


But I am not lost (I am not found)

by Swamp_Cat



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Dream Sequence, M/M, ish, you decide what that means
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-09
Updated: 2020-08-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:08:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25795633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Swamp_Cat/pseuds/Swamp_Cat
Summary: It’s from his father he gained his sense of justice.He wonders if a hunter feels just for having eaten.
Relationships: Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Kudos: 6





	But I am not lost (I am not found)

_ Watching him listen- makes you think of all the forgiveness in you, rising up like a gorge. Makes you think you wanna know how to sing like that, just to see him listen.  _

Today Will is a pitiful creature. 

He’s been one before, and in fact the mantle bears a sense of homeliness- this is where he came from. To this is where he shall return the moment he lets his grip loosen. From dust, to dust, and sometimes dust in between. Tidy. 

Hannibal Lecter is standing still in between two lines of pews with his eyes closed, half turned away as a choir of unimaginable magnitude lifts the roof from the church and sends it rocketing through the stratosphere all the way back to heaven. 

“I wonder if you understood my meaning when I told you I collect church collapses, Will,” Hannibal says from behind his shoulder. Will watches him walk past back to the place where he just stood, laying himself over his own afterimage. “You see, it’s not death that pleases me. Nor the absence of life, not even, particularly, destruction.” He turns his head back to look at him and smiles. “I’m not even quite sure what it is. The feeling precedes the reason, I think. But I've come to believe in the magnificence of... irony.” 

A dissonance so large and deep and perfectly in tune with wrongness, the left hand of love- The second blade of Gabriel- It makes me laugh.” Hannibal chuckles, and it’s a lovely sound. He can feel the cathedral ceiling of his own abdominal cavity start to crumble. 

Will Graham wakes up drenched in sweat. 

“It’s not that I don’t like seeing them,” he’s saying, hands making listless whorls against the smooth leather arm of his chair. “It’s not that they disturb me. It’s… insubstantiality. They always slip away. Ghosts are unsustainable.” 

Uncrossing and then recrossing his legs, Hannibal says “all things are subject to change. This is what so unnerves us about ourselves; that one stray wind may have blown us into a different life than the one we live now, made us a different person. Your ghosts are not unsustainable, they are dead. What is unsustainable is the solid manifestation of the dead: to pin it down, unwavering. You couldn’t keep a ghost to a solid form anymore than you could keep your mind to one. Your ghosts do not slip away, Will, they are constantly changing shape. Your phantoms never leave you. In order to stay the same, we must change, as the world changes around us. Abnormal reactions to abnormal situations are normal behavior, yes? You have one ghost and lots of time. Your singular mind makes up for fluid time and fluid events by grabbing faces and putting them on, whichever is relevant to you the most in that moment. Garret Jacob Hobbs. Abigail. Beverly Katz. Me.” 

Will digs his nails deep into the leather of the chair. But not violently. Just enough to indent, to see what happens. Sluggishly he looks up. “Beverly? Why? What happened to Beverly?” 

Hannibal smiles and takes a drink. 

Will Graham wakes up drenched in sweat. 

The scar on the side of his face. Everyone, who he is and isn’t. The difference ceases to have significance, they are equally relevant, irrelevant. Pain and brightness invade every crack of the world. Past and present, future and past- and what is to the left and right of time? If he is walking the line of where he was to where he’s going, what lurks beneath his feet? Yawns above his head? 

Hannibal, standing on the frozen grass before his front porch. Hannibal, crisp black coat, precious green scarf. Hannibal, frost bitten, cold hair, turned three quarters away before his head is drawn to the noise of the slamming screen door. And what does he want him to say.  _ Good morning, Will. The snow is beautiful today. I love you, let me inside.  _

Time snaps shut around the vision. 

Will Graham wakes up drenched in sweat.

“You wanted me to have no clarity,” Will says. He’s very angry. 

“You saw me drowning in my own life, in everyone else’s life, and you- you fucking shoved my head deeper into the water. That’s not- a  _ learning _ experience _ ,  _ that’s a ritual blinding.” 

“I’ll agree that it could’ve been,” Hannibal says. He’s very calm. “That I thought it might be before you let me see… who you are.” 

Will snaps and throws out “I didn’t  _ let  _ you see anything, you goddamn psychopath!” and Hannibal cocks his head like a bloodhound, eyes glittering. “Now you’re just being childish,” he says, and a black void opens up and swallows the ground like a pupil sucking in light. 

Will thinks maybe he’s not so upset about not being himself than he is about not getting to be anyone else. 

Childhood in Louisiana was never so much like a child in a place as a place- just being a place. Will had never felt so much distance between himself and his surroundings. Louisiana was the place before separation. The place before he found that space between himself and himself, before the doubling, tripling of self, before the one became a fractal million. How strange to be a part of something, as he must, even now, be a part of himself. Wholly absorbed in a world without recognition of its edges. It seemed that the awareness always arose after the fact, that you could only know how complete, how perfectly circular something had been once you had crossed it’s boundary. Once you could see the circle from the outside. 

Will saw the circle of Louisiana in an ever present corona of golden light which he himself was always at the center of. Memories consisted of things like  _ green _ and  _ warm  _ and  _ sticky  _ and  _ heat.  _ Touching the paint that peeled off houses. The hot fiberglass of boats in an afternoon sun. Masculine voices shouting, rasping, still glass sifters with too much of that thick resinous amber he’d only ever tasted once: a stolen fingertip of curiosity while his father calmed the dog. It tasted like nothing until it began to burn, wicked and strange, sharpness and sweetness inseparable. When he thinks of heat now he tastes whiskey. 

It’s from his father he gained his sense of justice.  He wonders if a hunter feels just for having eaten. 


End file.
